A Wiki in the IT dept?

[Arrow_Runner]

I was just curious if anyone on here is using or has thought of using a wiki as a knowledge base for their IT dept. We're going to start using one after a couple of other projects get taken care of.

If anyone could share their experience, thoughts, or how they organized things, that would be cool!

BTW, we're planning on using Twiki as our wiki.

[edwardb]

Sounds cool, we use a KB using Visual QSM. It's shockingly unfriendly to use.

A Wiki would be much better.

I'm no id*** but having something that you can add to easily rather than spending hours clicking links sounds good.

It cant handle formatted word docs properly so these all get added as attachments. it won't accept html tags very well either. It would be much better if you could use it with some object orientated design software that allowed you to insert docs and format them properly.

Ummm.

If your wiki can do that it might be useful, but the problem come at content. if you have bad/un-updated content no matter what you use you will be fighting a loosing battle.

[Arrow_Runner]

It cant handle formatted word docs properly so these all get added as attachments. it won't accept html tags very well either. It would be much better if you could use it with some object orientated design software that allowed you to insert docs and format them properly.

Ummm.

If your wiki can do that it might be useful, but the problem come at content. if you have bad/un-updated content no matter what you use you will be fighting a loosing battle.

AFAIK, one of TWiki's features is adding files to pages, not just word docs, but I haven't tried this. I'm also hoping to be able to use hyperlinks to files on share drives, that way if a user manually browses to the file or just clicks the link, any changes are made to the same file.

If you mean copying and pasting a word doc into a wiki, then I'm not so sure how well that will work. I'm sure it will, but it might not be quick and easy like copying something into Outlook, but again, I haven't tried it.

As far as content goes, you're completely right. That's why I brought up the idea of using a wiki as our central information base because it's so easy to manipulate and track changes. All of our information as of now is randomly dispersed in different email accounts, written paper, notepad files, and a IT dept folder with word docs.

[Arrow_Runner]

So is anybody else using a wiki? We've already got support outside the IT department and I don't even have it running in production yet!

[bj-kaiser]

I'm using DokuWiki as some sort of notepad replacement to keep track of the stuff I'm working on. It's a quick way to do some documentation and you can almost be sure that you can still read it like 10 years in the future (given you have proper backups) since DW stores the entries in simple utf8 text files. Not the undecryptable binary/xml crap MS Office produces.

However, if I wanted broad support here, I would need a solution that allows single-sign-on against NDS or at least usage of NDS as authentication backend.

[Arrow_Runner]

Ouch, I haven't seen anything about wiki software authenticating against anything else except it's own database.